In February The New York Times ran a story under the provocative headline, “For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside of Marriage.” The article suggested childbearing outside of marriage was the “new normal”—that recently released data signaled a “coming generational change” in Americans’ attitudes toward family formation. It was a dramatic story, but sociologist Kathryn Edin says it obscured the truth about how childbearing is changing in the United States.

“What the article essentially got wrong is that this is an education story, not an age story,” explains Edin, professor of public policy and management at Harvard Kennedy School and a prominent scholar of the American family. She points out that 94 percent of births to college-educated women today occur within marriage (a rate virtually unchanged from a generation ago), whereas the real change has taken place at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In 1960 it didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor, college-educated or a high-school dropout—almost all American women waited until they were married to have kids. Now 57 percent of women with high-school degrees or less education are unmarried when they bear their first child.

The metropolitan Atlanta foster care system continues to improve its adoption rate and is maintaining strong oversight over its foster homes, but still falls short in several key areas, according to a monitoring report released Friday.

Of the children ready for adoption during the latter half of 2010, 84 percent were adopted within 12 months, according to the report by federally appointed monitors of child welfare systems, which covers the last six months of 2011. An additional 11 percent of adoptions were finalized within 13-17 months. This is the state’s best performance to date and the first time it surpassed the 80 percent performance threshold, the report notes.

More and more family law attorneys have reported a major shift in the way divorce courts allocate alimony and child support responsibilities, according to a new survey by the American Association of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Just under half the organization's 1,600 members said women have been increasingly saddled with alimony payments, while 56 percent saw an uptick in child support rulings against women as well.

The percentage of stay-at-home fellas has doubled in the past decade, though it’s still tiny: just 3.4% of stay-at-home parents are fathers. But man, are those guys happy. Perhaps the joy they take in doling out Cheerios and doing loads of baby laundry is merely additional evidence of the inordinate pleasure that men take in parenting, a phenomenon discussed on Thursday on Healthland.

“It’s clear to us that men strongly identify with this as a role,” says Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family and lead author of the stay-at-home dads report. “They don’t have a feeling of ambivalence of, What am I doing, I’m a man. There is no sense of angst. These guys strongly identified with being a SAHD. They are proud of it.”